


Roulette

by theladyscribe



Category: Supernatural, World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Crossover, Gen, WIP Amnesty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 03:18:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1713005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theladyscribe/pseuds/theladyscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing people ask me is how did I survive all those years. There's two answers to that question. The short version is that I got lucky. The long version... Well. The long version starts before the war.</p><p> </p><p>  <strong></strong><br/><em>I'm interested in the long version, if you're willing.</em><br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	Roulette

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this story sometime in 2009 or 2010. I think I was going to write it for warbigbang or sncross_bigbang, but I never signed up and I never finished the story. I had actually completely forgotten about it until I came across it in my Google docs a little while back. Re-reading it, I'm rather proud of what I wrote, and I (mostly) like where I seemed to be going with it. There was a fifth section with Sam and Dean using pseudonyms, but I like it better without them, so I deleted it for this post. (If you really want to read that section, it's available to read at [DreamWidth](http://theladyscribe.dreamwidth.org/314999.html).)

**[Cassie Robinson is one of those rarities who survived most of the war east of the Rockies. When I meet her in Ohio, she has a machete slung at her hip. She toys with the leather wound around the hilt as she talks with me.]**

The first thing people ask me is how did I survive all those years. There's two answers to that question. The short version is that I got lucky. The long version... Well. The long version starts before the war.

**_I'm interested in the long version, if you're willing._ **

I was a journalism student at OSU. I was supposed to graduate in 2006, but there are thousands of people who can say that. Anyway, in 2004, right when rumors of some sort of epidemic were just starting to hit the States, I met this guy.

Dean Winchester was one of those guys your daddy always warned you about. The ones you're supposed to stay away from to protect your innocence or something. We met in a dive bar not too far from campus. I'd just broken up with my boyfriend of two years -- we'd started dating my freshman year -- and was looking to take out my bitterness on the entire male population of Ohio. Instead, I wound up taking Dean back to my place, and he stayed for the next month and a half.

Dean was a drifter. He told me he and his dad were traveling salesmen. It was a lie, but I didn't much care. The sex was amazing, and he was just a rebound anyway.

Because of that, I ignored his weirdness.

**_Weirdness?_ **

Yeah. Like how when we went out, we'd always sit in the very back row of the theater, or how he'd always sit so he could see the maximum number of exits in a place. He kept a knife under his pillow, until I found out. After that, I think he stuck it just under his side of the bed. He was a pretty good cook, if you liked bacon and eggs or tuna casserole -- the sort of things you learned to cook in home economics in high school.

He didn't talk about his family if I asked him questions directly, but sometimes he'd say things like, "Sammy used to do that." Sammy was his brother, I figured out after about two weeks. Sam was at school in California, but the one time I asked about him, Dean went sullen and quiet and drank three-quarters of a bottle of whiskey. I learned to stop asking questions after that.

 **[She shakes herself.]** Why am I telling you all this? This isn't what you're looking for. You want to talk about the war.

So around the time I admitted to myself that this thing with Dean was past being just a rebound, he got a call from his dad. There was a... sale he needed to make. He promised he'd be back in a few days, a week at most. "Easy as pie," he said. "Back before you know it."

And he was. He came back six days later with bruised ribs and a nasty cut above one eye. He told me he'd gotten into a barfight. I didn't believe him. That was the first time we fought.

A couple weeks later, he got another call from his dad. I was getting ready for finals, so I was okay with him being gone for another week or more. **[She laughs.]** I got a lot more work done in that week than I had the entire month previous.

*****

**[Jo Harvelle is a thin wisp of a woman who looks incredibly young until you see her eyes. Her eyes seem older than the Earth. She refused to let me come to her, instead giving me coordinates for what seems to be an old homestead in the middle of Nebraska. We're practically dead center in the contiguous United States, but when I ask her why we're meeting here, she doesn't answer immediately.]**

Zombies existed before the war, you know. It's just that whatever set off this particular... strain of them made sure that it would spread. They never have figured out what started the whole thing, have they?

**[She looks at me expectantly. I shake my head.] _No._**

They probably never will. And even if they did, I bet a million bucks nobody'd ever believe the fool who tried to spread the word about it. Nobody believed in zombies before the war. Nobody believed in _anything_ before the war. Now, they'll believe in zombies, 'cause everybody's seen them. Hard to disbelieve something the entire world's had to deal with. I wonder what will happen when they finally kill off the last of them. Will people forget about it? Will it just become another legend, the way everything else is?

**_What do you mean?_ **

**[She glances at me again, as if surprised to see I'm still there.]**

Do you believe in ghosts?

[I shake my head again.]

Well, they exist. So do werewolves. Vampires. Ghouls and goblins and djinni and a whole shitload of other monsters that most people think only exist in movies and books.

I grew up hunting. My dad was a hunter, before he died. My mom didn't like it too much, but she loved my dad, so she let him do it. He died on a hunt when I was ten. Mom ran this bar. It was a stopping place for a lot of hunters over the years. Got all sorts, from lifers to beginners and back again. When the war broke out, I guess it seemed like a natural place for people to gather.

They started coming in droves. Ash -- my mom's deadhead barkeep -- had this crazy security system set up on the perimeter of our property. It worked kind of like heat-seeking missiles, except in reverse. It could detect the cold spots that meant the people coming toward the place were zombies. We had roof access, so when something tripped the system, we'd just pinpoint where they were coming from -- north, south, whatever -- and send up a sniper. Picked 'em off easy.

**_How did you get supplies? Food and ammunition?_ **

That was easy. Zombies are dumb, and hunters are smart. Mom had a cellar full of K-rations. Never figured out where she'd got them from -- probably inherited from some crazy sumbitch hunter -- but there was enough to feed half the state of Nebraska, never mind thirty hunters used to roughing it.

******

**[Jessica was a beautiful woman, once. Built like an Amazon, she towers over me when she first greets me. Scars cover one side of her torso, spanning most of her left arm and up under her jaw and onto her left cheek.]**

The first thing people notice about me are the scars. **[She smiles.]** They're from before the war. There was a fire in my apartment -- I was lucky to get out alive. Luckier still to survive the burns with relatively few complications.

 

******

**[Maggie Zeddmore doesn't look like a typical freedom fighter. She's petite, but there's a glint in her eye that says few people think of messing with her.]**

Nobody believed us at first. And who would have? I mean, we were the Ghostfacers. We had a TV show. We were kind of like the real-life version of Mysteries, Inc.


End file.
